Does lack of health insurance kill?
On Saturday, I published an article about a report from the nonprofit Families USA estimating that on average, about three working-age people died in North Carolina every day in 2006 because they lacked health insurance. I received a couple of e-mail responses.
One was from Sheryl Dawson, who said that as a health insurance agent, she sees many people turned down for health insurance because of pre-existing medical conditions:
As a licensed health insurance agent, I cannot tell you the number of people what are turned down by insurance companies, and cannot get coverage no matter HOW MUCH they pay. My estimate is that about half of the applications I submit are turned down because of health issues, including diabetes, sleep apnea, hypertension, pregnancy, high cholesterol/triglycerides, heart issues, depression, smoking, cancer and a wide variety of other problems. And don't you think it makes sense that these people -- already with a serious enough disease to warrant exclusion from being insured -- would die more frequently? The ONLY way that these people can be insured is with group health insurance, where the laws force insurance companies to insure everyone in a company, not just the ones whose medical profile they like. Once these individuals lose their job, essentially they're screwed.
Another correspondent sent a link to a Cybercast News Service column taking issue with the original research on which the Families USA report is based. The headline on the column is a little misleading -- it says critics say it's "not true that thousands died for lack of health insurance." What the critics it quotes do say is a little more nuanced -- that there's no way you can know for sure how many people, if any, might be dying for lack of health insurance. (The column also goes into why people might not be insured and whether estimates of the number of uninsured are correct, questions the Families USA report didn't attempt to address.)
